Hammond Lecture Focuses on Neuroscience of Music

Hammond Lecture Focuses on Neuroscience of Music

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
November 11, 1999

To say that Michael Hammond prepared for his Oct. 15 lecture would be an understatement.

A year ago, he was asked to give the keynote lecture at the International Symposium on the Neuroscience of Music in Niigata, Japan. The event would bring together experts in music-related fields–including musicians, psychologists and scientists–for the purpose of achieving a better understanding of the cognitive processing of music and its neural substrates.

‘What Music Asks of the Brain’

The following is an excerpt from Michael Hammond’s keynote lecture–“‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t …’: What Music Asks of the Brain; and the Brain of Music”–on Oct. 15 at the International Symposium on the Neuroscience of Music in Niigata, Japan.

“The great effort under way to clarify our understanding of what music is and how it works in us and on us–our mind/brains and our bodies–will have important consequences for music as well as neuroscience. Needed are the broader cultivation of musical sensibility and experience among scientists along with a much enhanced scientific literacy and awareness among musicians, as groundwork for the confident development of productive theories and methods of experimental inquiry at the interface.” Hammond, the dean of the Shepherd School of Music, has a background in neuroscience but had not done much scientific study for a while, so he spent the year catching up. He read about 1,000 papers and 30 to 40 books “to really try to get up to speed.”

He concentrated on the writings of the scholars who would be attending the symposium in order to address his remarks to their research.

It pays to do one’s homework: Symposium participant Pierre Divenyi, a research professor at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California at Davis, says Hammond gave “a comprehensive account of the major scientific challenges” facing the participants, provided direction for future research and offered “very interesting insights.”

At the symposium, scholars invited Hammond to speak to and work with their colleagues in Helsinki, Tokyo, Konstanz, Marseilles, Montreal and San Diego.

He titled his keynote lecture “‘It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t…’: What Music Asks of the Brain; and the Brain of Music,” a reference to Duke Ellington’s dictum that “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Hammond used “swing” to stand for that which distinguishes music from a mere succession of sounds.

The study of what music is and how it works on our brains is an emerging field, says Hammond, who notes that the number of people involved in its study is increasing and the technology, such as magnetic resonance imaging and PET scanning, is greatly improving.

At the symposium, he says, two basic questions were often raised: When we hear music, what is happening in the brain and where is it happening? Says Hammond, “It was an attempt to pull together the people from around the world who have contributed the most to those questions and to get them all thinking together.”

Noting that there are two special classes of sounds that are unique to humans–language and music–Hammond says that language has been studied extensively whereas music has not. In his lecture, Hammond laid out the cognitive territory peculiar to music and explained that while music does not have a set of semantics, like language, it does have a set of rules. He then asked: “What is the nature of those rules, and how can we use those rules to investigate what is happening?”

Given his broad intellectual background, Hammond was an excellent choice for keynote speaker. Early in his academic career, he planned on careers in both musical composition and medicine. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he became involved in neuroscientific research and later did research in neuroanatomy at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

Eventually he chose music over medicine, but as dean of the Shepherd School of Music, Hammond has drawn on his neuroscientific expertise. For example, he played a major role in specifying the acoustics for every room in Alice Pratt Brown Hall, a building often praised for its splendid acoustics.

To Hammond, music and science are a continuity. He notes, for example, that “musicians cannot achieve their artistic purposes until they are virtually technically flawless, and exactly the same thing is true in science.”

Hammond believes the topics discussed at the symposium should be of interest to any serious musician: “The question of how music is heard, how it is processed, and what it is people need to know in order to understand musical ideas–those are all questions which are grist for the musician’s mill.”